Eighteen passengers from a hantavirus stricken cruise ship are now being monitored inside American medical facilities, and the federal agency built to lead the country through exactly this kind of moment is operating with a quarter of its workforce gone. Sixteen of those passengers are at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, including one in the biocontainment unit who has tested positive for the Andes strain of hantavirus. Two more are at Emory University in Atlanta, and at least one of them is experiencing symptoms. The Dutch flagged MV Hondius, which left Ushuaia, Argentina on April 1 and traveled through Antarctica and several remote South Atlantic islands, has now produced three deaths and eight known cases. The Andes strain is the only known hantavirus that spreads person to person.
What makes this moment uniquely dangerous has less to do with the virus itself and more to do with the agency that is supposed to be running point. Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, gave the cleanest summary of where the CDC actually stands. She said the agency is “not functional. It cannot carry out any of its mission. America has no national public health agency any more.” Read that twice. A scientist with no political stake in the conversation is publicly saying the United States no longer has a working national public health agency in the middle of an active person to person transmissible virus event.
Her warning is grounded in the math. By the end of 2025, the CDC had lost roughly 24 percent of its workforce, according to a KFF Health News analysis. The firings began on February 13, 2025, in what current and former staff now call the Valentine’s Day Massacre, when nearly 1,300 probationary employees were forced out. A second round came on April Fool’s Day. A third came on October 10 during a record 43 day government shutdown, when more than 1,300 additional employees received reduction in force notices, with roughly 700 of those rescinded a day later after the agency admitted the layoffs had been issued by mistake. The Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the CDC, cut its overall workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 under a March 2025 restructuring announced by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with 2,400 of those eliminated positions sitting inside the CDC itself.
The leadership picture is just as thin. The CDC went without a permanent director for more than six months after Trump fired Director Susan Monarez. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is now serving as interim CDC director while simultaneously running the National Institutes of Health, an arrangement that would have been considered a public health emergency on its own a decade ago. The agency also lost its ethics board. The new second in command, Dr. Ralph Abraham, previously served as surgeon general of Louisiana, where he banned the state health department from promoting vaccines.
The August 2025 shooting at CDC’s Atlanta headquarters added trauma to a workforce already being torn apart. Tom Frieden, the former CDC director who led the agency through Ebola and the H1N1 response, told CNN this week that the CDC is “on the sidelines” of the hantavirus response and that the United States is “much less safe” with a weakened CDC.
For context on why this matters, the last major Andes virus outbreak happened in 2018 in Epuyén, Patagonia, where a single birthday party triggered an outbreak that produced 34 cases and 11 deaths. Argentine public health authorities contained it through aggressive contact tracing, quarantine, and a trained response infrastructure that had been built up over years. That kind of containment requires staff, lab capacity, and federal coordination. Those are the exact resources the Trump administration spent the past year cutting away from the CDC.
The official line from WHO and the CDC remains that public risk inside the United States is extremely low, and historically that has been true. Andes virus does not move easily through casual contact, and the 2018 Patagonia event remains the worst case scenario on the books. But low risk depends on a functioning surveillance and response system. State health departments in Georgia, Arizona, California, Texas, and Virginia are now monitoring residents who disembarked the Hondius before the outbreak was identified. That work flows through CDC infrastructure that has been hollowed out, and through a chain of command currently being run by an interim director with another full time job.
The hantavirus story is contained for now. The story underneath it is not. A deadly virus reached American medical facilities this week and the country’s public health agency is half there. Whether the response holds is going to depend on the people still left inside CDC doing the work of an institution that has been told for over a year that it is the problem.
